If we could be sure that Brighton's 'safe rooms' would help addicts return to a well-ordered life, then they would be easier to support

A report has suggested "drug rooms" could be a solution to Brighton's misuse problems

I'm not sure what I feel about the proposal for Brighton to open a shooting-up gallery – sorry, a drug consumption zone, a "safe and hygienic" nurse-supervised space where addicts could inject themselves without fear of arrest. I am sure that my real feelings about the addicts and drunks who clog up the town end of St James's Street in the daytime aren't printable. Our personalities are manifold, aren't they? And when I just want to walk the length of the street and cut down to the seafront, the squawking and constant fighting, amongst those whom such a facility would be designed to help, serves only to irritate me. Because I'm Morally Upright Citizen Graeme, at those times.

But then, don't judge. Don't judge lest ye be … I wrote a few weeks ago that we need to be better at judging one another, and I haven't changed my mind. But I find it hard, particularly when we're talking about the dissolute, as though "they" are entirely separate from "us", so different that it's impossible to envisage joining their ranks. The thumping beat in my head – "Just give up. Give up. No-one cares whether you get out of bed, no-one cares whether your clothes are clean, no-one cares whether you work or not. Just give up" – is one I've learned to tame and live with (I think), but that doesn't mean I don't know it's there, or that I can't empathise with people who have given in, turned off, and dropped out.

If I were more sure that such safe rooms would help people find the strength to step back into the groove of the well-ordered life, I'd be a supporter. If I were less worried that they might prove magnets for those who have no interest in that groove, I'd ignore Morally Upright Graeme. "The evidence", for and against the proposition, is mixed; in any case, this isn't a topic where "the evidence" – divorced from cultural implication – can "do" our politics for us. There is no machine, here.

(We have safe spaces where people can legally ingest psychoactive drugs now, drugs that some will abuse unto death: we call them pubs. Do pubs cause alcoholism, by making alcohol a cultural norm? We don't know, of course, but even if "the evidence" proved the case, I couldn't care less. A world without pubs would be bleak.)

I'm very lucky: that tempting, siren percussion – that life is pretty unendurable – never became more than a background noise, and was then cured by the love of a good man, which is one reason I bang on about it so much; the stability of marriage is the best trick invented by humans to stave off the desolation which follows too often on the heels of black dog and his running mate, loneliness. I don't suppose love will be on hand in the safe rooms, however well qualified the nursing staff. Thus the vicious circle: it's love that will cure the addict, but the absence of love makes the drug more desirable, while the drug makes that absence more probable. It's the absence of love that turns a city cold, something that I occasionally remember, even when I'm exasperated by those messy drunks on St James's. Like all melancholics, they're drawn to the sea, whose rhythm is perhaps a counterbalance to the internal, incessant drumming.

Last week in Brighton I went into a newsagent to buy, what else, The Daily Telegraph (no, really). I had to wait to be served, while a woman in front of me counted out a bill payment in coins. It took minutes, which is a long time for a human being to be inspected by a shop-keeper and a queue of customers. She was then told, by the man behind the counter, that he didn't take bill payments anymore. She would have to go somewhere else. The woman knew enough of existence not to plea, and had sufficient reserve to ask, politely, if the man knew where she might go. He didn't, and nor did I, and nor did anyone else.

That woman deserves a safe room. She was still clinging on, though I expect the beat of the drum in her head is more insistent than it is for most of us.